~ Sixteen ~
“What you doin’ walking into my office unannounced, boy?”
“Oh, I need an appointment now?” Colt gave his father a brief hug before sliding into the seat opposite him in the Silver Diner.
“Yes sir. You know important business takes place right here.”
“Yeah? Ma says the only business that takes place in here is you flirting with waitresses and wearing out your welcome.”
His father laughed his loud booming laugh and folded his Washington Post, setting it aside.
Since his retirement, Josiah Green—formerly a U.S. Marine Corps sergeant—still looked and sounded like a man of consequence. Colt had gotten his height from him, and his broad-shoulders and barrel-chest. The penetrating dark eyes and honey-toned complexion, he had inherited from his mother; that and the perfect symmetry of his face. Dudes called him ‘pretty-boy’ if they wanted to get under his skin. It was a taunt that always made Colt wish he had Josiah Green’s formidable, much more forbidding features.
“The only flirting I do is with my wife,” his father said. “She send you over here to fetch me?”
“Nah. Just thought I’d come break the fast with my old man for a change. See what you been gettin’ up to.”
Ever since his retirement, earlier that year, Colt’s father had been finding it difficult to break the habit of getting out of bed at dawn. So, he went to pick up the Post, and then found his way to the Silver Diner for his customary breakfast of two cups of dark roast coffee and the Jack Cheddar Omelet. He lingered there for a spell, then headed back home where, according to Colt’s mother, he was underfoot until she cooked up some errands for him to run around town, things to keep him busy so he would still feel like a man with a purpose.
“Lemme get my favorite girl over here to take your order,” his father said, lifting a hand and beckoning for a waitress.
“Don’t call them girls, Pops. Women don’t like that.”
“What you mean? Your momma’s been my girl for more than thirty years now. I ain’t never heard her complain.”
Colt sighed and leaned back onto the red banquet seating, waiting for the server to approach. When she did, she grinned at him, looking between him and Josiah.
“This the son you always bragging about?” she asked, putting one hand on an ample hip. “The apple doesn’t fall far, does it?”
“Yup. This is Colton. My only son.”
“I’m your only kid,” Colt said, holding out a hand.
“I’m Sandra,” she said. “What can I get you, honey?”
Colt ordered a vegetarian omelet and juice. When Sandra left them alone, he looked his father over more closely.
“You look good, Pops.”
“Why shouldn’t I?” his father returned. “Got nothing to do all day except sleep and make love to my wife.”
Colt raised a hand and grimaced. “Could you not …?”
His father laughed. “Just hope you’re as lucky one day, to have a marriage like me and your momma got. The body isn’t always willing, but believe me, the mind …”
“Nah, man. For real. Stop,” Colt said, grimacing and holding up both hands. “But matter of fact, that’s related to what I was hopin’ to talk to you about a little bit.”
“What? Marriage? You and Samantha finally decide to settle down?”
Colt leaned in, not sure he’d heard right. “What did you say?”
“You and Samantha. You decide to …”
“Nah. I mean, what makes you think it’s me and Sam?”
“Who else would it be?” His father shrugged.
“But we’ve just been … friends though. All these years, we’ve just been friends.”
“That right?” His father sounded unconvinced.
“Yeah. Until …”
Josiah looked up, his eyebrows lifting a fraction. “Until?”
“A few weeks ago.”
Josiah leaned back and grinned, nodding to himself. “Your momma’s gon’ be real happy to hear that. She was worried when you were hooked up with that little Asian girl from the tv. Called her a little fast-butt.”
Colt laughed. “She kinda was.”
“But I don’t judge. She’s somebody’s wife, I’m sure. Just not yours. That was always gon’ be Sweet Thang.”
His father had called Sam that for as long as Colt could remember. Whenever she came around and his father was there, Pops would grin as wide as could be. ‘Look at you, so pretty,’ he’d say, before looking over at Colt’s mother. ‘Just a sweet little thang, ain’t she?’
Soon he was calling Sam that more often than he called her by her given name.
Colt exhaled, shaking his head. “Why you so sure of that, old man? I’m not even sure. Especially not after …”
Colt thought about last night, and his drunken drive to Sam’s house. He hadn’t done most of the drinking at Mulvaney’s when he was still with Drew, because Colt didn’t want him to see how hard the revelation about Sam had hit him.
And it had hit him really hard, and just kept right on pounding him right in the gut, even after he was home. Even now.
He had been telling himself, after that crazy night at his house when she’d gone sex-crazy on him, that it didn’t matter what or who was in her past. Not with all the crap that would come tumbling out of his if she ever cared to look. But Sam was so sexually-aggressive, he sometimes couldn’t help but wonder. He knew she was his now, but whose had she been before?
Once in a while, after sex, when she was sleeping the deep slumber of the sexually-satiated, he sat up a little while, just thinking the craziest, most off-the-wall shit. Jealousy like a white-hot rock sat in the middle of his gut. And the more he thought, the bigger and hotter that rock grew.
Who the hell had she been with? What had they done together? Like, what if she’d done some real freaky-shit with some other dude?
The one guy he knew about, who he had personally taken the measure of, was that kid from college, the Poindexter. And Colt knew for a fact, homeboy didn’t have it like that. Hell, even he didn’t have it like that back in the day. They were kids, then. Eighteen, nineteen?
So, it had to be someone else, some phantom lover from her more recent past, who had lit the bonfire for what was now a highly-sexual woman wrapped up in a pink, girlie, prissy little bow.
To think now that it might have been Drew. To think that Sam had done to Drew what she had done to him … yeah, so he drank when he got home, alright. And then, propelled by a fog of jealousy and a sense of betrayal, the likes of which he had never before experienced in life, he drove over to her place, risking a DUI at best, and at worst, his life or someone else’s.
“Here you go, honey.”
Sandra was back. She set down a large glass of juice in front of him and refilled his father’s coffee cup.
“Last one for me, sweetheart,” Josiah said. “Don’t want to be climbing the walls all day.”
She ambled away, and Josiah looked at Colt, searchingly.
“So, what’s troublin’ you?”
“It’s not that easy, Pops. What you and Ma got? It’s not that easy to find.”
“Maybe it’s ‘cause you lookin’. When maybe, it’s always been there.”
“You mean me and Sam? If you knew what happened last night, you might not be so sure. If you knew … And y’know what? I don’t know that I ever even thought about Sam like that ‘til recently, so …”
“Is that right? So all them little boys you used to run off? What was that about?”
Colt shook his head. “That was just … She’s my best friend, Pops. And nig … dudes be dirty. You know that. I didn’t want her to get used. Or hurt.”
“When she was twelve, and thirteen?”
“You’d be surprised.”
“All I’m sayin’ is, I don’t think it was that. I watched you and her. I know a few things about how these things work.”
“No doubt. But I never saw Sam as being my girlfriend. Or even as …”
Colt stopped. Because what he was saying wasn’t entirely true. There had been a time … there had been times, when he looked at Sam and he saw something new; felt something new, about her.
The first time was the summer when he turned sixteen and finally found, in Mercy Edwards, a girl was willing to not just let him slip his hand in her panties, but to take the panties off. A girl who didn’t just touch him shyly over the fabric of his pants, but took him out, and grasped him in her fist, and held and stroked him to completion. A girl who actively sought out an opportunity for them to go all the way, until she found that chance, in her parents’ four-hour (each way) day-trip to a distant relative’s funeral in New York.
After getting some from Mercy, Colt thought about ‘doing it’ all the time. Because the good-good wasn’t called that for nothing. But the confusing part was that around the same time, he started noticing things about Sam as well. That was the summer she started wearing two-piece swimsuits.
Every day, she was at his house, along with the rest of their friends, wearing that white bathing suit, sunning herself, running around the garden, playing Marco Polo and not always attentive to the movement of her swimming garment. Whenever there was an extra inch of ass, or a glimpse of the sides of her breasts, Colt noticed; and once, there was even a fleeting nipple slip that made her and a couple of the other girls shriek with laughter as Sam hurried to cover herself.
He figured he was checking out his best friend on the low because he was horny as hell, and now that Mercy had shown him what was possible, every girl was a potential sex-partner. Even Sam. But it wasn’t that, because he didn’t look at the other girls—Janice and Lisa, Leatrice—like that. Just Sam.
Soon, even Mercy started to get on his nerves. When they weren’t sexing, or he wasn’t thinking about the next time, he didn’t necessarily want her around. And by the end of the summer, he’d canceled her altogether.
“Son, you over-thinkin’ it,” his father told him now, sucking his teeth. “Tell me what happened.”
Sandra returned with his meal, so Colt was able to take a minute to think about his answer. When she left, he looked up again.
“All those little boys I used to chase off as you call it? Seems like I wasn’t able to chase ‘em all off.”
Josiah shrugged. “Well good for her then.”
“No,” Colt said. “Not good for her. Drew, Pops. I’m talkin’ ‘bout, Drew.”
“Oh.” His father leaned back. “She told you about that?”
“What …? You knew?”
“Yeah, I knew. It wasn’t no secret.”
Colt shook his head, dropping his fork. “It had to be. Because nobody told me.”
“From what I remember from her mother, you and Sam weren’t in touch as much around that time. You were up there in Philly actin’ a damn fool.”
“You could’ve told me,” Colt said, standing up. He dropped his napkin.
Josiah looked incredulous and then laughed. “C’mon now. You serious? You ‘bout to run home and cry?”
“You’re wrong for that,” Colt said, stabbing a finger in his father’s direction. “You could’ve told me.”
“Listen here …” His father’s voice lowered the way it always did when he was about to tell Colt to get back in line. “That wasn’t my job. That was her business. What you expect me to do? Yank on your coattail and tell you what? That your cow done wandered out the barn?”
Colt made a ‘pfft’ sound and sat back down.
“Excuse me for that,” his father said, sounding nonplussed for a moment. “I don’t mean to compare her to … What I mean to say is, she don’t belong to you, Colt. She’s a living breathing, independent human being. If you want her, and especially if you want to keep her, you gotta earn her, young-blood.”
Colt said nothing, taking his seat once again and staring his father down, aware that he had no comeback to that reasoning.
Josiah reached for his paper and shook it open.
“And don’t you ever in your life point that finger at me again,” he said. “‘Less you want to lose it.”
“I can’t talk right now,” Sam whispered into the phone. “I’m about to go into a thing. Can I call you after?”
Just a few feet away, Jason was reclaiming his briefcase from the security conveyor belt at the main entrance of the Russell Senate Office Building. It was one of the most impressive edifices on Capitol Hill, and whenever she entered it, Sam was impressed anew. It was still surreal that she was there almost every day now as part of the lobbying team.
“Yeah, but just wanted to check in and see if you’re free for lunch?” Drew asked, on the other end of the line.
Sam hesitated.
“Look, I know I should’ve given you a heads-up before I told him, but he was just …”
“I really can’t talk about it now,” Sam said. “But okay, yes. I’ll meet you for lunch. Where?”
Drew gave her the name of a casual-dining restaurant in Dupont Circle and they hung up, just in time as Jason made his way toward her.
“You ready?” he asked her. “This one might be tough. This office isn’t inclined to do anything just for the good of mankind. So we’re gonna have to bring our ‘A’ game.”
“I’m good,” Sam said nodding. “Let’s go.”
The meeting went poorly from the outset.
The staffers hadn’t even reserved a conference room for the meeting, so Sam and Jason had to make their arguments while standing in the hallway, the bright sunlight and heat from the windows landing directly on them. Sam was perspiring through her dark suit, and along the back of her neck, which made it difficult to concentrate on sounding persuasive. Twice when Jason looked to her, trying to cue her in to answer a question, she’d been slow to respond.
The entire thing was over in less than fifteen minutes, which was a dead giveaway that the staffers weren’t interested. They didn’t even do the obligatory exchange of business cards that was de rigueur in Washington DC’s business circles.
“Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose,” Jason said, patting her on the shoulder as they headed for the elevators.
But Sam knew he was just trying to make her feel better. When lobbying Senate offices, the stakes were much higher than in the House of Representatives. There were only one hundred senators, compared to four-hundred plus in the House, so every Senate vote counted, and they had probably just lost one.
Outside, she and Jason took separate taxis, as she had her date with Drew in Dupont Circle. Since her meeting had been so short, she would likely have to wait for him. But that was fine with her. It would give her some time to pull herself together, have a tall glass of iced tea and prepare for the conversation they were about to have.
The interior of the cab was thankfully cool. Summer in DC had begun; and begun with a vengeance. Sam shed her suit-jacket, dropped it on the seat next to her satchel and placed her hands on the back of the front passenger seat, so her arms would be lifted away from her body, and her armpits could cool down and air out.
“Hot,” her driver said. “Yes?”
“Yes,” she said. “Very hot.”
Under normal circumstances she enjoyed entertaining conversation with cab drivers, but today she wasn’t in the mood. The failed meeting she had just had, and the difficult one she was about to have were weighing too heavily on her mind.
That morning, when she left for work, Colt was still sleeping off his bender on her sofa. Not wanting to have to engage with him, Sam had carefully placed his car keys on the table nearby and set her coffeemaker to brew around eight a.m. in the hopes that the aroma would wake him.
Because his SUV was parked askew in her driveway, and she didn’t want to go back inside to move it, just to get her own car out of the garage, Sam had called Lyft and waited by her curb until it got there. She had slept poorly, thinking about the talk she and Colt would have to have, sooner or later.
He had every right to be upset. But he had no right to be angry.
Everything that had happened between her and Drew felt so long ago now. And Colt hadn’t been at all focused on her and their friendship at the time. They weren’t estranged, exactly, but things had been different then and they were more distant from each other than they had ever been. She didn’t owe him details about her love life, just as she never felt entitled to details about his.
Colt’s senior year at Georgetown—Sam’s senior year—had been unlike all the others. He was scarcer, more elusive. Sometimes it took more than a day for him to return Sam’s calls, and when she stopped by his place, he was often out.
Twice, she’d spotted him from a distance on campus, after having not seen him for what seemed like a longer than usual time. Once he was with two other Hoyas players. They looked like a trio of magnificent Masai tribesmen in tracksuits, tall and graceful and impossibly beautiful. Sam stood still and watched until they were out of view.
The second time she saw him, Colt was with a girl. She was pretty, blonde and thin. Pretty, blonde, thin girls gravitated toward the basketball players at Georgetown. And some basketball players gravitated toward them. Colt had never been one of those players. But this time, he looked amused by the girl he was with, who was leaning into him as she walked, her corn-silk hair whipping in the wind, and wrapping itself around his arm. Colt was leaning back into her.
Later, unable to get the vision of him with that girl out of her head, Sam called and left him a message.
‘I guess you’re really busy, or whatever,’ she said in her voicemail. ‘Call me back … if you want.’
Later, Colt showed up at her place. It was well after eleven in the evening. He smelled like beer and another scent that was subtle, but obviously feminine, and for that reason, repellent to Sam. He didn’t mention the voicemail. Maybe he had gone home after whatever he’d been up to and heard it, and then decided to come to her place.
They talked for a little while about nothing at all. He was tipsy, distracted and his eyes kept closing on him as he talked. It felt like there was a space between them that hadn’t been there before. Sam knew he was thinking about the NBA, and about how early in the draft he would go. She knew he was excited about it. But they didn’t talk about that.
Maybe an hour or so later, when they’d been watching something random on her small television for a while, Colt told Sam he was too tired to make it back to his place and asked if he could crash with her. She told him he could. She hated that he’d been drinking before he thought to come see her, and she hated that unfamiliar feminine scent he was saturated with.
The last thing he said before he fell asleep, fully-clothed next to her on her bed, Sam crowded against the wall, was, ‘white girls are crazy.’
And that was how Sam knew he had sex with the blonde girl. That was how she knew that he’d enjoyed it. She fell asleep with a weight like an anvil on her chest, and one slow tear, tickling her as it made its way down the side of her face.